Getting to Yes

I don't remember where the poster came from, but I remember the blue UFOs hovering over hills with duct-tape loops holding them on the wall, and I remember knowing—but never learning—that it was a painting by Roger Dean. Somehow I knew also that Roger Dean painted album covers for Yes, who at that point I had certainly never heard. The poster lived on one wall or another for a few of the places we lived in in the stretch during which I went to two schools for fourth grade, a third for fifth, a fourth for sixth, and a fifth for seventh.

When the summer ended and I rejoined my parents for (a couple weeks after) the beginning of seventh grade, my uncle, my mom's youngest brother, was living with us. He'd work with me on Frisbee throwing / catching, and I'd sit in his car and listen to his tapes, or the radio, soaking up his thoughts on Don't Stop (drumming on the steering wheel) or Everybody Have Fun Tonight ("everybody Wang Chung tonight") ("This is an anthem!"). I suspect but can not prove that he was the original source of the poster—I know he was the source of my first orange crate of records, turntable, receiver, and speakers; he'd moved out one night, unexpectedly, after a falling out with my mother.

It was 1986. I didn't know much. I knew I'd loved a glowing-blue poster, by a guy who did album covers for Yes.* I knew AC/DC was my favorite band, maybe my favorite thing, I knew my favorite novel was Starship Troopers, with all its powered armor and pointedly problematic patriotism. Flipping through the orange crate, I saw art familiar, friendly to my eyes. I pulled out it, and skimmed song titles, and when I found "Starship Trooper", I knew this is, this has to be, For Me. I knew, before the needle hit the groove, that this would surely crunch harder, punch faster, than anything off of Flick of the Switch.

What I heard was, essentially, early R.E.M. with a more expansive heart: soaring organ, chiming guitars, carefully plucked, and a falsetto opening the song with "Sister bluebird / flying high abo-o-ove".

I was nothing close to prepared for this. I pulled the needle up and off, stuffed the record back in its sleeve, went back to hard rock radio and didn't think about Yes again for close to 20 years, when my girlfriend was out of town, and I had her mom's car so I could dogsit, so (naturally) I went to Best Buy, where I made a joke purchase of Yes' greatest hits...which blew my mind...and then, a few years later, I was at last ready to realize: Yes makes pretty music that makes me happy; sometimes that's what I want.

Now "Starship Trooper" is one of my favorite songs. When the pretty, hopeful, bombastic section (that I'm pretty sure is called "Life Seeker") gives way to the quick-stepping-then-electric "Disillusion" part (probably), with its layered "aaaahhhh" harmonies, that is extremely pleasing and heartening. When everything drops out and phased, flanged guitar carries the day solo for a while, with a hook so irresistable that Love & Rockets would have a huge hit with a song consisting exclusively of it, then building intensity and instrumentation on top of it for long minutes...then the coily solo comes in and combines soaring with the kind of heart-cutting wince of happy pain you feel when you see your crush (or when I see a particularly blocky puppy head), I realize, in as real a way as I can manage: this is church music.

Twenty years ago, when I heard Yes, it repelled me. A few weeks ago, working a strike in a town not my own, lonely (and exhausted, and generically upset / sad) in a hotel room, I paid for a music streaming service I'd used the free version of for years, putting up with mostly awful ads and unable to download anything, subject to data availability and the whims of Wi-Fi. The first thing I downloaded: Fragile.

NOTE: The artist responsible for my poster, and, I think, a few other artifacts from that time that I haven't been able to remember clearly enough to run down, was not Roger Dean. A lot of the things we just know, but maybe can't remember learning, turn out to be not so, later. This may be particularly true with the knowledge of, and imparted by, Record Store Guys.

The artist is Gilbert Williams. The image I loved, I recently learned, was an album cover for Crosby, Stills, and Nash. It probably sold a couple million copies. thing it's important to learn is that a cool thing can be shared. It doesn't have to be just yours. (My copy of the poster did not have any words on it, though. I have to make that clear.)

A Comprehensive Review of Alex Garland's Film Annihilation, Compendious in Its Correctness (Also It Is: Indisputable)

Point 1.

Oh, Alex Garland.

Point 2.

Here are some things that are extremely cool.

• that one episode of X-Files where the scientists in the Arctic discover a creepy worm alien or whatever and the one guy yells "We're not ... who we ARE!"
• The Thing
• 2001
• Alien / Aliens
• Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now / going up a river to where humanity disintegrates

National Lampoon: Missing White House Tapes

When I was a young kid, like most young kids, I had a dad. And like most dads, he had a lot of things I wasn't allowed to touch: a stereo receiver; a turntable; a wooden orange crate of records; a reel-to-reel tape deck.

Obviously, most of my early memories of being left alone revolve around playing my dad's records.

For some reason, I gravitated to a couple covers.

And that's why, at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10, in 1984 in a shitty rented house in Kansas, I started wallowing in unbelievably weeded-out in-jokes about Nixon and Watergate. (A couple Doonesbury compilation paperbacks lying around the house helped me understand what the jokes were about, as did living in a fiercely pro-Geraldine-Ferraro house, in a fiercely pro-Reagan state in a virulently pro-Reagan country.) Mainly, of course, what allowed me to crack the code was listening to the records again and again, just burning them into my brain by the unsubtle magic of repetition.

And by so relentlessly placing myself into these bracing winds from the 70s, I think I grew a unique insight into our current situation, as terrifying and awful as it is, because this current situation is a tragedy, based closely on an earlier farce.

Which brings me back to the National Lampoon album, Missing White House Tapes. That's what I want to talk about right now: that farce (not the farce my parents endured, nor the tragedy we're preparing to weather now). In particular, I want to talk about Side Two. (Side One is ... interesting, but you have to smoke a LOT of weed to appreciate its highly abstract, formalized audio-collage work, and some of the references are absolutely incomprehensible unless you lived through the actual period. Some great dick jokes -- appropriate for trying to abuse Dick Nixon -- though.) So. Side Two. You can listen here (start at 17:22):

It's a masterpiece of the comedy album form: simulating the experience of half-idly flipping channels but always returning to the central show that's on, which is network TV coverage of the Impeachment Day Parade. Complete with stuffed shirt network weenies narrating the events, fatuously. Interludes include a wonderful Sesame Street parody pitting bumbling buffoon "Big Dick" and his greedy, ravenous friend The Shredder Monster as they try to explain the difference between 9 (original tapes) and 7 (turned over tapes), and between "lying" and "misspeaking yourself" and "falsehoods and inoperative statements" and "taking responsibility and taking the blame" and "withholding evidence and protecting the presidency". It's a wonderment that results in a chipper, chirpy public-television voice teaching the children to say "Shit. Shit! Big Dick! Is full! Of shit!"

A lesson that has resonated every day since 1984, and should reverberate more and more powerfully and awfully in the days to come.

Anyway, my goal here is not to liveblog my sixth listen to this album in the past four days. Merely to urge you and yours to listen to it, because it clearly lays out a sick, stunted, depressed best-case scenario for our immediate future.

I'll leave you with a quote from our network TV puppets, watching the floats go by in the Impeachment Day Parade:

WALLACE GLADSTONE: Barbara, I know for you, there were many moving moments, if you'll pardon the alliteration (chuckles). Perhaps you'd care to describe one or two of them to our viewers.
BARBARA MERKIN: Well, the strangling of the bald eagle was IT for me.
WALLACE: It was thrilling. Of course, the effigy-burning... And now, here's a contingent of our heroic POWs, many of whom spent years in prison in Hanoi courageously resisting the persistent efforts of their North Vietnamese captors to brainwash them into thinking that the United States is run by a tiny clique of criminals, dominated by powerful business interests, bankrolled by huge, monopolistic corporations, working hand in glove with the CIA in a campaign of intrigue at home and abroad.
BARBARA: Jesus, why did they bother?
WALLACE: Oh, I don't know, Barbara.
...
WALLACE: Well, that's about it for America's day of shame. The president has been officially impeached, and the eternal microphone has been switched on as the CIA brass band plays Wiretaps. But, Barbara, this is not only an historic moment, it's also a personal one. What has impeachment meant to the little people? The ordinary, simple people? You, for example, Barbara.
BARBARA: Well, Wallace, I just don't think the American people should in any way be ashamed of this tragic occurrence. Although a bunch of bleeding-heart do-gooders have used constitutional force to do away with our beloved president, this country is still founded on the age-old traditional values of bribery, violence, and assassination. And just because there are a few good apples in the barrel, doesn't mean that the vast majority aren't rotten through and through.
WALLACE: Okay, good thinking, Barbara.

Anyway, as we sink back into the 70s I think a lot about declaring certain statements inoperative, about tiny cliques of criminals, about strangling bald eagles at parades for Impeachment Day. I think about my dad's records, and talking to him in quotes from the dumb records we loved. I think about the last conversation I had with him, not long before he took his life. I think about the 70s, about where we were, about where we are, about the ways it's hard to tell the difference, and the ways it's easy. About the ways things are broken and the ways we might yet fix them. Some of them, anyway. And I miss my dad.